Spring! Daylight Savings! Blossoms! Hot weather! It's a pretty great time to be in the garden. And its always a great time to learn about soil, because where would our plants be without it? Craig aka the Urban Agronomist aka soil scientist extraordinaire taught us a bunch of incredible and useful things about soils.

A healthy soil is full of life: worms, nematodes, microbes and so much more.

Soils are made up of sand (big particles), silt (middle sized particles) and clay (tiny particles).

Loam, about 40% sand, 40% silt and 20% clay, is the ideal soil for a veggie patch: having a great capacity to hold onto nutrients and an ability to hold on to some, but not too much, water. The the ideal pH for most gardens is around 7 - at this pH all nutrients are readily available to plants. At much higher or lower pHs, many of the nutrients required by plants become unavailable. One of the best things we learned was that if your soil hasn't got a great texture, or isn't quite the right pH: compost will help. If your soil isn't full of life: compost will help. If your soil is low on nutrients: compost will help. If soils have a superfood, it's compost. Which is great news for us, because as you will have seen from previous posts, we have plenty of compost!

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Read all about it: MUC Garden and Burnley Student Association share updates on their activities.